BibSonomy Blog

ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge

2008-05-09T17:50:00.001+02:00

Since we're organising this year's Discovery Challenge, we would like to announce the

Call for Participation

ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge

Antwerp, Belgium, 15 Sept. 2008

This year's discovery challenge deals with two tasks in the area of social bookmarking. One task covers spam detection and the other is about tag recommendations. The dataset the challenge is based on is a snapshot of BibSonomy. More details about the tasks can be found at the challenge website.

Important dates

May 5, 2008: Tasks and datasets available online.
July 30th, 2008: Test dataset will be released (by midnight CEST).
August 1st, 2008: Result submission deadline (by midnight CEST).
August 4th, 2008: Workshop paper submission deadline.
August 8th 2008: Notification of winners,
publication of results on webpage,
notification of paper acceptance.
August 14th, 2008: Workshop proceedings (camera-ready) deadline.
September 15/19th, 2008: ECML/PKDD 2008 Workshop

Feature of the Week: Similiar Tags

2008-05-09T16:54:00.001+02:00

Since this week tag pages in BibSonomy like /tag/ontology also show similiar tags. They're located below the related tags we provide on each tag page in the sidebar. You can use similiar tags for navigation when you're looking for posts related to a certain tag which might have been tagged with not the same but other, similiar tags.

More information on similiar tags can be found in the FAQ and in the online help.

Feature of the Week: Integrate BibSonomy Tag Clouds in your website

2008-04-24T15:35:00.006+02:00

BibSonomy now offers the opportunity to integrate its tag clouds into your private website. For this purpose it provides a JSON feed containing the retrieved tags which are filled in your cloud dynamically by a JavaScript snippet. At the moment this feature is only available for the BibTeX page but will be extended to all pages offering tag clouds in the near future.

In this example you see a tag cloud with related tags to this publication.

You can choose between an alphabetical or a frequency order and define a limit of shown tags. Just follow these few steps in the tutorial to integrate such a tag cloud in your website. There you can also find a test tag cloud where you can check the functionality by specifying several arguments.

If you have questions or comments, don't hesitate to contact us.

Stefan

See the BibSonomy API in action with WizTools.org RESTClient 2.1

2008-04-15T17:46:00.000+02:00

When developing RESTful applications or accessing such services, it can be of great help to have a handy tool to try out its different functionalities. A useful application to this end is the WizTools.org RESTClient. It provides a slim and convenient interface to test HTTP methods like POST, GET, DELETE or PUT, along with the possiblity to edit a variety of parameters for each request.

A tutorial to access our BibSonomy API with this tool is found here:

http://java.dzone.com/announcements/wiztoolsorg-restclient-21-rele

We think that this example demonstrates well both the capabilities of the RESTClient application and our API!

Best,
Dominik

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy on your iPhone

2008-04-01T10:49:00.003+02:00

Use your iPhone for accessing BibSonomy! @BibSonomy is a website written by Nils Windisch that shows the five most recent/popular bookmarks and publications from BibSonomy, and is optimized to look good on your iPhone. Nils suggests that "the best use case is probably waiting for the bus or being bored in school seminars as @BibSonomy just gives you a quick and easy glance of what’s up at BibSonomy." Read more at http://nilswindisch.de/code/iphone/bibsonomy/.

We stronlgy encourage and support the integration of BibSonomy data in 3rd party applications, as demonstrated by @BibSonomy. If you're interested in building your own application, have a look at our API, which should provide all necessary integration facilites.

Easteregg of the Week: BibSonomy Link on Websites

2008-03-28T10:20:00.002+01:00

Some websites such as the German news magazine Spiegel provide a link or a button on their web pages so that a page’s visitor can easily store the page in a social bookmarking system. For example, the column Zwiebelfisch about the specialities of the German language shows a "Bookmark" link above the title. Providing such a link has several advantages for providers and users: on the one hand, being visible in a social bookmarking system can increase the popularity of the website, on the other hand users get the possibility to store interesting web resources at a central place.

The technique to include such a link or button on your website is simple and can be realized by including a small javascript into your html code. For people interested in offering such a link or button to store bookmarks in BibSonomy we now provide the javascript code on the following BibSonomy page. Just try it on your website or blog – it is really easy!

Beate

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy Inside

2008-03-14T17:55:00.000+01:00

As started in the last feature of the week we release this week additional information about BibSonomy which will help to integrate BibSonomy into other services like catalog systems of libraries. As discussed the former FOTW BibSonomy relies on different hash keys to find similar publications. The needed information to compute these keys is described here. The page includes a small demo and a java example implementation which is used in BibSonomy to compute the different hash keys. This implementation can be used to compute the same hash keys in other system. Together with the possibility to access the tag cloud of a publication by a hash via BibSonomy's API a nice integration and a community summary of a publication can be integrated into every system.

We think this is a first step for a tighter integration of Bibsonomy and libraries catalog systems or any other similar system.

Feature of the Week: Tags for Resources

2008-03-07T09:06:00.004+01:00

If you're using the API and are interested in all tags users have assigned to a specific resource, you now have the possibility to get the tags by using the API-URL http://www.bibsonomy.org/api/tags with the parameter "resource=[hash]" (together with the parameter "resourcetype"). E.g., a request to /api/tags?resourcetype=bookmark&resource=64122a860e632f5ed0148740e25239e6 gives you all tags for the bookmark with the hash 64122a860e632f5ed0148740e25239e6. This allows you to include all tags related to a resource in your application.

Please note, that you have to use the interHash of a resource (as given in the XML output of the API) for this functionality. Further information can be found in the API documentation.

Note: When using hashes of BibTeX posts from the BibSonomy web interface links (e.g., /bibtex/295b16cdb7731d697234d355fc4e68fe3), one must be careful to pick the "correct" hash. In the links all intra-hashes currently have a "2" and all inter-hashes a "1" prepended and are thus 33 characters long (compare /bibtex/295b16cdb7731d697234d355fc4e68fe3/emanuel with /bibtex/1148dc0c64433f631174b5fc419597dd6). This is to distinguish several types of hashes in the web interface (the "old" intra-hashes which started with a "0" still work!). So when using a hash from the web interface, care must be taken that it is really an intra-hash (e.g., starts with a "2") and before querying the API the preceeding "2" must be removed.
We will shortly extend the API to also accept 33 characters long intra-hashes.

BibSonomy backup client available

2008-02-26T11:31:00.003+01:00

A golden rule when working with computers is to never forget a regular backup of important data. For the case of your data (Bibtex entries and bookmarks) stored in BibSonomy, we are investing a lot of effort (regular database backups, replication databases, ...) on the server side to prevent data loss in any form, so basically you can sleep sound while we take care of your backup strategy.

However, the most trustworthy backup remains still the one that I have done on my own and the one that is stored on a computer of my choice. To support you in this task, we are happy to present you our brand new backup tool: It is available for download here:

https://gforge.cs.uni-kassel.de/frs/download.php/17/bibsonomy-userbackup.zip

It is written in Java and is based on our API. It basically

downloads all your Bibtex and bookmark data (or the public data of other users) to your computer
saves all data in a zip file
enables to restore the backed-up data from this zip file back into the BibSonomy account.

To test it out, follow these steps:

unzip the .jar-file contained in the downlodable file (see above)
if you do not yet have an API-key to access our API, you can obtain one here
start the application on the command line by typing java -jar bibsonomy-userbackup.jar (Java needs to be installed on your system at this point)
follow the instructions to back-up or restore your BibSonomy data

Please note that in the current status, all data is backed up except private PDF documents and private notes. We are working on including these as well, and we hope that the tool is already useful for you in its current status. If you have questions or comments, don't hesitate to contact us.

Best,
Dominik

2008-02-08T14:08:00.000+01:00

Organize your view on collected resources

BibSonomy allows you now to navigate faster through your bookmarks and bibtex entries (see above option in the figure). A new feature is now integrated which offers you to navigate besides going to the next side also to the last side of your bookmark and bibtex collection.

A second option is pointed out at the bottom on the figure. You can choose the numbers of entries. The range is 5-10-20-50-100 and is also valid for bibtex entries.

Best, your BibSonomy Team

Feature of the Week: Using the Webservice with Python

2008-01-25T11:45:00.000+01:00

Since more and more users want to use BibSonomy's Webservice, we put together an example how to retrieve posts programmatically - everything with Python. You can have a look at the script here.

If you want to get a list of your publications you would do this:

bibsonomy = BibSonomy('YOUR_USERNAME', 'YOUR_APIKEY')
posts = bibsonomy.getPosts('bibtex')
# do something with the posts...
for post in posts:
print post.resource.title

The last two lines iterate over the retrieved posts and display the title for every post. Have a look at the various classes (Post, BibTex, Tag, etc.) for more information about available attributes.

If you consider using the script and develop it futher, we would be happy to hear from you.

Feature of the (last) Week: Multilanguage Support

2008-01-24T14:31:00.000+01:00

As researchers and students of different nationalities work with BibSonomy, its new release starts with integrating multilingual features.
The following pages now include English and German language support:

homepage (/)
User-Pages (/user/USERNAME)
Group-Pages (/group/GROUPNAME)
Group-Tag-Pages (/group/GROUPNAME/TAGNAME)

We would like to extend this offer in the future. If you are proficient in a language other than German or English, you may contribute to this feature by helping us translating the above pages.

Beate

Feature of the Week: Update of JabRef Client

2007-12-21T19:51:00.000+01:00

Dear BibSonomy API users,

just in time before Christmas we finished an update of the BibSonomy version of our JabRef-Client. Its main new features include:

- new (fancy :)) look of tag cloud
- only tags are being displayed in the tag cloud which belong to
 publications, not to bookmarks
- as well as further minor bugfixes

Find the client available for download at:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/download/JabRef2.3b-BibsonomyEdition.jar

Have fun with it! We hope we were able to make live easier for you in 2007 with our BibSonomy services and this JabRef-Client. Now, we wish you a wonderful Christmas time and a good start into 2008!

Best,
 Your BibSonomy Team

Feature of the Week: Character encoding of imported files

2007-11-29T13:02:00.000+01:00

For this weeks feature of the week I'll first briefly discuss what a "character encoding" is and afterwards explain, why it is important during BibTeX import.

On a very low level, computers only understand zeros and ones. Hence, a mechanism is needed to encode symbols like letters and numbers as sequences of zeros and ones. A "table" which assigns to each symbol its corresponding zero-one sequence is called a character encoding (or character set). This table allows a computer to interprete the data in a file and show the correct symbol on the screen (or printer). Unfortunately, several such character encodings exist. Depending on the chosen character encoding, the same sequence of ones and zeros might stand for different symbols. To correctly display a piece of data, the computer must know its interpretation - its character encoding.

When uploading a BibTeX (or EndNote) file to BibSonomy, we face the same problem: we have to interprete the file with the correct character encoding. Typically, it's not possible to guess it (it's just an interpretation of the data - each interpretation could possibly be correct) so there is an option on the post_bibtex page which allows you to specify the character encoding of the file to upload. A click on the options link reveals a dropdown list which contains a choice of some typical character encodings. The default is "UTF-8" which is nowadays more and more common. However, older files might have a different encoding like "ISO-8859-1" (also known as "latin1"). If you're unsure about your data, UTF-8 is a good choice. If this gives you errors during import or strange looking characters afterwards, try another encoding. In Europe "ISO-8859-1" is very common, too.

Search functionality is available again after some difficulties

2007-11-27T18:37:00.000+01:00

During a server update on the afternoon of November 27th, 2007, we were confronted with a technical difficulty which affected temporarily the search feature of BibSonomy. The consequence was that it was not possible to search BibTex or Bookmark entries, because the search tables in the database were corrupted. We are sorry for this and apologize for any inconvenience this incident has caused.

In the meantime, we have located and eliminated the problem, and we are now happy to offer you the complete BibSonomy functionality which you are used to.

Best,
Dominik

Feature of the Week

2007-11-15T11:13:00.000+01:00

As explained in the last feature of the week, BibSonomy allows users to structure the content via SUPERTAG <- SUBTAG relations. The built tag concepts are available for searching and navigation through our folksonomy system. As seen in the figure above it is ease in handling, whereas each step is symbolized with a circle. Only choose “concepts” (step 1) as search option and type a tag which your are interested in (step 2). In the last step (step 3), you get resources and a visual presentation of your concept as hierarchy. Miranda

Feature of the week: Retrieve resources by disjunction of tags

2007-11-14T09:22:00.000+01:00

A very common way to browse through your own or other people's repository on BibSonomy is via one or more tags, e.g.

http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/semantic+web.

Hereby, the tag-based retrieval is done in a conjunctive manner, i.e., the result of this query will comprise all bookmarks and publications tagged with semantic AND web. We are often asked if we offer any other possibiliby of combined tag queries, e.g. by disjunction - one might e.g. be interested in all resources tagged with semanticweb OR ontologies.

This behaviour is not accessible via a specific URL scheme, but can be achieved by invoking an old BibSonomy buddy - namely concepts! As you will know, BibSonomy allows you to define relations between tags in the form:

SUPERTAG <- SUBTAG

(see also http://www.bibsonomy.org/relations). A supertag along with all its subtags is denoted a concept in BibSonomy, which can be used to retrieve resources like this:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/concept/tag/ontology

The characteristics of this retrieval method is now that all resources are returned which are tagged with ontology OR one of its subtags. This constitutes, in fact, a retrieval of resources by a disjunction of tags. We are aware that this has some limitations, as a concept has to be defined before this type of query is possible - but facing a tradeoff between efficient query processing and freedom of query formulation has led us to this decision, with the ultimate goal to keep our service highly responsive for all of you as our users.

Feature of the week: A tagcloud for the ISWC + ASWC 2007

2007-11-09T13:24:00.000+01:00

Next week, the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference are hosted in Busan, Korea. About 120 conference, workshop and doctoral papers will be presented and discussed. With the help of a RDF dump, publication metadata and hyperlinks are now available in BibSonomy.

The system contains all accepted papers, together with the keywords (tags) that authors have associated with their papers or that show up in the paper titles. To help conference participants finding interesting works, a web-frontend has been created which shows a tag cloud of the most important keywords. The color of each tag indicates the track to which most abstracts annotated with that tag belong to. Clicking on a tag (keyword) will retrieve from BibSonomy the abstracts that have been tagged with it.

While attending the conference, participants can further collect, annotate and share publications using BibSonomy. The "cool" stuff is presented when clicking on "See you what your collegues find cool". A specific search showing all publications of a searched author completes the retrieval facilities of BibSonomy.

The idea to enable publication sharing in conferences was started at the Statphys23 conference in 2007 under the umbrella of the Tagora project. The ISWC + ASWC tagcloud has been realized with support of Nepomuk.

Given the necessary BibTeX entries to store publication abstracts, metadata and associated keywords in BibSonomy, we can provide BibSonomy web front-ends presenting a conference's tag cloud and interests (cool stuff). With this initiative we hope to enhance and round up discussions and information sharing among research communities.

Beate

Detecting duplicates in BibSonomy

2007-11-02T12:20:00.000+01:00

One feature we added recently was the detection of duplicate references in a user's publication list. During the design of the system we had a discussion how to find links between references of different users if they are not identical. Therefore we had to solve two problems: First we have to find the duplicate entries and second it has to be fast as nearly all pages check for duplicate entries to provide a nice browsing.

The solution we came up were hash keys. The system is able to handle four different hash keys. Currently we use two of them, the intrahash and the interhash.

The intrahash avoids duplicates in the users library and tries to find only entries mostly identically. To compute this hash we use the title, type, author, editor, year,journal, booktitle, volume,number fields with only minor normalization. This hash also ensures that a user can only have a certain publication once in his library but the entry has to by nearly 100% identically.

The interhash key was designed to find as many similar publications as possible to support browsing within the system and to point users to other users with similar interests. Therefore the hash key is based only on title, year and author/editor information heavily normalized. In this way we can identify also entries which rely on different spelling of e.g. author names.

The new duplicate detection feature bases the duplicate detection on the interhash to detect duplicates in the library of a users. As the intrahash key reacts on nearly every change in an entry it allows to store also very similar entries with e.g. only a small change in the booktitle. The interhash key is able to detect those similar entries and list all publications of a user which appears at least twice within the users publication list. Checking this list you can remove unwanted duplicates and cleanup your your publications list.

We hope this feature is helpful. Have fun

Andreas

Feature of the Week: New URL schemes

2007-10-19T16:41:00.000+02:00

We have implemented some new URL schemes to make your life easier:

Reference by BibTeX key. If you are looking for a particular entry for which you know already who has stored it (eg, yourself) and for which you know the BibTeX key, you can directly refer to it with the following scheme: http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtexkey/KEY/USERNAME . For instance, check out http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtexkey/Wille82/stumme. If the user has more than one entry with the same BibTeX key, then a list of all hits will be given. You can use this feature also for referring to entries that we mirror from DBLP, once you know how DBLP generates its BibTeX keys, eg, http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtexkey/journals/jacm/HopcroftU69/dblp.

Short-Cuts. The following links are available only when you are logged in. They do not provide new functionality, but are convenient short-cuts.

direct link to the list of your own bookmarks and bibliographic references: http://www.bibsonomy.org/myBibSonomy
direct link to the BibTeX list of all your own bibliographic references: http://www.bibsonomy.org/myBibTeX
direct link to the list of your own relations: http://www.bibsonomy.org/myRelations
direct link to your own collection of full texts (PDF, PS or DJVU): http://www.bibsonomy.org/myPDF
direct link to your own duplicates: http://www.bibsonomy.org/myDuplicates

Feature of the Week: Content negotiation

2007-10-12T15:07:00.000+02:00

Content negotiation helps to represent a resource at the same URL in different ways considering the capabilities of the requesting user agent. It allows user agents to choose between several representations of a resource by giving an appropriate MIME type in the HTTP-Accept-header.

Browsers typically accept MIME types of text/html to get some human readable representation. A semantic web application, though, might prefer to get a representation of the resource in RDF and thus accepts only application/rdf+xml. In BibSonomy we have added this behaviour to URLs representing particular resources - i.e., a single bookmark or publication reference (which may be represented by several posts). You can access this feature by prepending the /url/ and /bibtex/ URLs with the prefix "/uri/", e.g.,

http://www.bibsonomy.org/uri/url/d1bb7b3f6cafafa7b418f9f356ff2e83

or

http://www.bibsonomy.org/uri/bibtex/2b8b87c78e9e27a44aacde0402c642bff

Depending on the Accept-header of your user agent you get a redirect to the appropriate representation of those resources. You can read some more information on this in the BibSonomy help system.

Feature of the Week: Fulltext Search within Tags:

2007-10-05T10:50:00.000+02:00

Our fulltext search contains an addition helpful feature to support the user to navigate through the content of BibSonomy. The tradition fulltext search finds words contained in URLs, titles, descriptions and especially all BibTeX fields like author, editor or bibtexkey. Now, we improve the fulltext search functionality to find also words, which match with tags (see figure at top). Use it and find more bookmarks and publications in which you are interested. Miranda

Feature of the Week: API and JabRef Connectivity

2007-10-05T09:07:00.000+02:00

People have been asking us about this for a while, and now we are happy to announce it: BibSonomy now has an application programming interface (API) which allows you to code external applications that interact with BibSonomy.

So for example, assume you have a standalone tool for managing BibTeX entries which you use on a daily basis. Now you want your tool to be able to interact with BibSonomy, so that you can publish references from your desktop to BibSonomy at the push of a button.

JabRef: Standalone BibTeX Manager now Interacts with BibSonomy

Actually, this is what we have implemented as a first application ;-) Have a look at the API download page. There you will find a customized version of the great JabRef reference manager which has been extended to interface with the BibSonomy API. This version is able to publish your entries to BibSonomy, retrieve references with a specific tag, or modify references in a fully-fledged desktop application rather than using a web interface.

This also means that you can use your references on your laptop, say, when you do not have network connectivity, and synchronize them with BibSonomy when you reconnect.

REST API for Programmers

For the more technically minded: the API offers a REST-type interface to BibSonomy resources. So for example, to get all users, you'd say "GET /users" over HTTP. To modify a particular user, you'd say "PUT /users/<username>" with an appropriately formatted XML document with the user data. The API documentation documents the possible operations and their current status — not all of them are finished yet.

So this allows you to code an application against BibSonomy in about any programming language, although you'd have to write all the HTTP and XML wrangling yourself (at the moment). For the Java language, we are also offering a client library which lets you write applications against BibSonomy that handle elements of BibSonomy, such as posts etc., as proper Java objects and hides all the gory details.

Getting an API Key

Of course, all this only works within the bounds of proper authorization. To be able to use the API, you have to obtain an API key: just send a mail to api-support (AT) bibsonomy (DOT) org, stating your user name.

Finding relevant resources and users using FolkRank ordering

2007-09-24T16:47:00.000+02:00

Another major extension contained in the recent BibSonomy release is a
new mechanism to retrieve relevant resources and users for a given tag,
called "FolkRank".

From your previous experience with BibSonomy and other collaborative tagging systems like del.icio.us or flickr you will know that a typical way of browsing is to select one or more tags to retrieve a list of resources (e.g. bookmarks) ordered by the date of their addition to the system. This is very useful to discover the most recent material; but in some cases, the goal is to retrieve the most relevant resources for a given tag.

Consider as an example the tag "www". Obviously very relevant bookmarks for this tag are e.g. the WWW conference websites (e.g. http://www2006.org/, http://www2007.org/, ...). This conference takes place every year and brings together researchers and business people from all over the world to discuss trends and developments in the area of the World Wide Web. Though being highly relevant, these bookmark do not necessesarily appear in let's say in the top-10-list of bookmarks tagged with "www" (http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/www).

For finding (amongst others) highly relevant resources for a given tag, our research group has developed an algorithm called FolkRank (see http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/24d8b4f79814691fbe6db8357d63206a1/stumme).
Its idea is similar to Google's PageRank algorithm, i.e. it analyzes iteratively the link structure between users, tags and resources in order to calculate relevancy.

You have now access to this great feature via the URL http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/www?order=folkrank or by clicking "order by folkrank" on a tag site. When you have a look at the result (sticking to the example of the tag "www"), you can see that highly relevant bookmarks like the WWW conference websites are found at the very top of the retrieved list. Furthermore, FolkRank is able to calculate highly "relevant" users for a given tag:

This information can give you a clue who might be an expert in a certain research area, and might thus support you in networking with colleagues interested in similar topics as you are. Have fun and success with this new tool!

Best,
Dominik

myBibSonomy-Menu: Manage your Personal BibSonomy Data

2007-09-17T09:06:00.000+02:00

After last week's short description of the new BibSonomy release's changes, this entry will explore one feature in detail: the menu under "myBibSonomy". Basically, this menu offers different perspectives to view and manage your personal BibSonomy data:

* Yep, clicking on the first link (myBibSonomy), you still get to see your bookmarks, publications and the tags you have used so far.

* myFriends allows to share entries with people you trust.

* myRelation presents all relations you have defined so far. You can add more, edit or delete relations as you like.

* The mySearch feature offers a fast search in your collection. You can specify tags and authors from a list containing your personal tags and authors. When you chose the "and" option, you can mark several tags and authors by pressing the CTRL button. The system will return all entries which can be found with the given tags and which were written by the specified authors. If you still want to reduce the results, you can filter the entries by entering the title's keywords, tags or authors in the "filter" textfield.

* myPDF forwards you to an overview of those personal publications to which you have attached a document (pdf, ps or DJVU).

* Finally, myDuplicates shows duplicate entries within your publication list.

Beate